Gullivers Travels

1
Gullivers Travels

• Fierce Indignation

2
The trouble with satire

• One danger of satire is that it is so topical and
  that in a few years, nobody will remember the
  objects of satire.
• Is GT too topical or is it still relevant? Why
  or why not?

3
Lilliputs

• Lilliputs are little, literally and morally
• Schism over which side of an egg to eat
• Suspicions and rivalries end in the Lilliputs
  spurning Gulliver
• Government officials gain jobs by creeping and
  leaping (i.e. kissing ass or being opportunistic)

4
Brobdignags

• Gulliver becomes a Lilliputian in Brogdignag
• King is wisesees through shallowness of people,
  especially G. and his descriptions of Europe
• Gunpowder
• King horrified that G. describes destruction in
  familiar manner insensitively
• Gunpowder makes it possible to not face your
  enemy
• More bang for your buck

5
The View From a Breast

• Pp.86-87 G describes what a breast looks like up
  close spots, pimples, frecklesnauseous
• Humans are terrifying when you look up close
• G. sees Brobingnags as Lilliputs saw him
• Eyes are like microscopes
• Reduce everything to parts

6
The Watchmaker God

• B/c science (led by Newton) is systematizing the
  world, the Enlightenment brings with it a new
  conception of God as a watchmaker. He creates
  the world, winds it up like a watch, and sets it
  in motion.
• Very different than a providential God who
  intercedes in peoples lives
• Lilliputs are fascinated with Gullivers watch
  and King of Brogdignag wonders if Gulliver is a
  toy-like contraption
• Are we just mechanisms/wound up clocks?

7
Swifts answer hopefully not

• Satire throws a monkey-wrench in the works.
• Knowledge should be related to moral life, not
  just objective science.
• This is the crux of Swifts satire in Book III.

8
Laputa and Lagado philosophical speculation and
practical science

• Laputians are like astronomer in Rasselas their
  heads are literally in the clouds
• Flappers are needed to keep them alive b/c they
  ignore the exigencies of the real world
• Women prefer to be treated poorly than to be
  ignored

9
Flying Island

• Flying islandBalnibarbirulerruled
• EnglandIreland
• George IIIAmerica
• Countrywide (mortgage industry)homebuyers
• These relationships are defined by haughtiness,
  power, detachment and ruthlessness.

10
Projectors and their silly projects

• Pp.188-189 universal machine
• Satirizes shortcutsthe idea that growth and
  education can come without application
• i.e. University of Phoenix, mail-order degrees,
  self-help books

11
On language

• Thomas Sprat wished to reform language so that it
  would be more empiricalspoke before Royal
  Historical Society
• p. 190 projectors propose cutting verbs and
  participles, or just abolishing words in favor of
  objects altogether
• Problem if you reduce language, you reduce
  consciousness
• Corollary we live in more than one realmin the
  empirical world but also in a world of ideas and
  emotions
• Rich language and metaphor are necessary to
  reflect this world

12
Utopia/dystopia

• utopia designates the class of fictional
  writings that represent an ideal but nonexistent
  political and social way of life. It derives from
  Utopia (1515-1516), a book written in Latin by
  the Renaissance humanist Sir Thomas More which
  describes a perfect commonwealth. It is a
  conflation of the two words, eutopia (good
  place) and outopia (no place)
• dystopia (bad place) applied to works of
  fiction, including science fiction, that
  represent a very unpleasant imaginary world in
  which ominous tendencies of our present social,
  political, and technological order are projected
  into a disastrous future culmination

13
Book 3 as Dystopia

• Scientific and political theme are one future is
  a nightmare
• No room for individuality (Lord Munodi)
• Bureaucracies ossify (harden)
• Science and politics both become detached from
  everyday life and the needs of humans

14
Mocking the Travel Narrative

• xviii This volume would have been at least
  twice as large, if I had not made bold to strike
  out innumerable passages relating to the winds
  and tides, as well as to the variations and
  bearings in the several voyages together with
  the minute descriptions of the management of the
  ship in storms, in the style of silors likewise
  the account of the longitudes and latitudes
• p.148 I thought we were already overstocked
  with books of travels.

15
Swifts Epitaph

• Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor
  of Divinity, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where
  fierce indignation can no longer rend the heart.
  Go, traveler, and imitate if you can this earnest
  and dedicated champion of liberty. He died on the
  19th day of October 1745 AD. Aged 78 years.